A. J. Stewart Smith, the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics, served as Princeton's first dean for research from 2006 to 2013. On July 1 he begins a newly created position as vice president for the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).

In his tenure as dean, Smith built the Office of the Dean for Research from its inception into a fully functioning department of professionals dedicated to making the University research activities run smoothly.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has joined with five leading Chinese research institutions to form an international center to advance the development of fusion energy. Creators of the center organized its framework in March at a two-day session in Hefei, China, that brought together leaders of the world’s major fusion programs.

PPPL postdoctoral fellow Ammar Hakim, center, described his poster on unified methods for simulating plasmas to physicists Steve Cowley, left, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in the United Kingdom and a member of the PPPL Advisory Committee; and Frank Jenko of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany.

Magnetic reconnection is a phenomenon of nature in which magnetic field lines change their topology in plasma and convert magnetic energy to particles by acceleration and heating. It is one of the most fundamental processes at work in laboratory and astrophysical plasmas. Magnetic reconnection occurs everywhere: in solar flares; coronal mass ejections; the earth’s magnetosphere; in the star forming galaxies; and in plasma fusion devices.

One of the most fundamental tenets of astrophysical plasma physics is that magnetic fields can be stretched and amplified by flowing plasmas. In the right geometry, this can even lead to the self-generation of magnetic fields from flow through the dynamo process, a positive feedback instability where seed magnetic fields are stretched and amplified by flow in such a way as to reinforce the initial seed. This happens only when plasma is highly conducting, fast flowing, and when the magnetic field is weak. Laboratory plasmas exploring this parameter regime are surprisingly rare.

In 2005 a novel imaging spectro-polarimeter, the Coronal Multi-channel Polarimeter (CoMP), was deployed to the Evans Facility in Sunspot, NM to measure the solar corona’s magnetic field. The design of the instrument permitted it to capture something quite unexpected – the ubiquitous Alfvénic motion of the coronal plasma. Shortly thereafter the NASA/JAXA Hinode mission observed the roots of the Alfvénic motion in the complex chromospheric boundary region between the Sun’s surface and the corona.

Three teams led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have won major blocks of time on two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Two of the projects seek to advance the development of nuclear fusion as a clean and abundant source of energy by improving understanding of the superhot, electrically charged plasma gas that fuels fusion reactions.